B is for Bestiary.

Really. There are too many things to choose from. Creating a world? Playing with magic, setting limits and then exploring what’s possible within them? The ability to throw nearly anything at your characters to screw up their plans? Planting familiar human struggles in a strange world?

Maybe. But one of the things I have the most fun with is creatures. Animals. Mythical beasts, both previously known and not. Setting them free in a world and seeing what happens.

You’d recognize many of mine. You like dragons? I’ve got ’em. Young and nasty ones, old and… well, they’re different. I was going to give you a snippet for WIPpet Wednesday of Aren explaining dragons, but it just doesn’t work as a snappy excerpt, and y’all have enough to read from me this week.

But yeah, we’ve got dragons here. They don’t play a huge role in the story, but they’re vitally important to the larger world that it’s set in, and they do make several appearances.

Rawr. (bestiary.ca)

What else have we got? Gryphons (see above). A species (sub-species?) of winged humans known as the Aeyer. Flying horses, too. Merfolk. Cave fairies. Rumors of unicorns, unconfirmed by any of my characters as of right now. Sea monsters and water dragons. Humans, magical and not. And then there are the animals you’d be familiar with: cats, dogs, eagles, rabbits, geese, horses… well, you’d be familiar with a small number of the horses. The native ones are a little different.

Maybe that’s the Most Fun Thing about writing Fantasy. We get to take the everyday and stand it on its head, take it apart and re-build it into something better or more sinister or more challenging. If we want horses to be omnivorous beasts that are better suited to our world, we can do that. If we want dragons to be quick and nearly mammalian or slow and cold-blooded as any lizard from our world, who’s going to say we’re wrong?* As long as we’re consistent and work within the world and the rules we’ve set out**, we can do as we please. When we’re staring at the blank page at the beginning of a new project, there are no limits.

Huh. Maybe that’s why I don’t write anything set in our world. And why I find real life boring. And…

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About Kate Sparkes

Kate Sparkes was born in Hamilton, Ontario, but now resides in Newfoundland, where she tries not to talk too much about the dragons she sees in the fog. She lives with a Mountie, two kids who take turns playing Jeckyll and Hyde, two cats, an intentional boxer and an accidental chihuahua. She's the author of the bestselling Bound Trilogy (mature YA Fantasy).
www.katesparkes.com
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I have to agree. Creating the monsters in my books is one of my favorite parts. I don’t even plan them any more. I just have ‘monster’ written in the outline and design the thing as I go. Makes for some bizarre critters. Now I’m tempted to do a week of monsters and make it a game somehow.

In Sword in the Stone (Disney), Mad Madam Mim breaks the rules and turns into a purple dragon. No purple dragons allowed. I love that you say you can’t just invent a”purple dragon” to save a characte, that rule made my morning.

Of course once you’ve decided that minotaurs, werewolves, and fairies all exist in your world, you have to figure out why they’re there and how they interact with everything else in the world. That’s the big thing I learned from outlining a novel over the past 2 months. Everything is freakin’ connected, and if you want to add something, you’ll need a good reason for it to exist

I really do! I love figuring that stuff out. One of my little irritations with some books is how every species just acknowledges humans as dominant. I really doubt that would ever happen in mine! I’m lucky I can even get the cave fairies to help the merfolk out from time to time.

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